Catgirl System

Reading Cantrip Ingredients:

• 6g gray poledust
• 4g silver fish scales
• 7g sturdy black feathers, at least one palm’s length

Quest: Collect Ingredients for the Reading Cantrip
Progress: 0% (0/3)

I was now officially Bayce’s errand girl. Bayce was over the moon. So was I. And apparently out there in the cosmos, Sierra was too, masterminding my Quests in that great beyond.

I wasn’t just Bayce’s guest or weird fainting neighbor anymore. Instead, I was…

Earning my keep? Gainfully employed?

In any case, it made me feel a new sensation of swirling warmth in my chest. Readiness, and pride.

Bayce was so excited she couldn’t keep still. Her hands fluttered about, churning the air, shifting papers only to put them right back again. Her voice went back and forth from serious mode to squealing with delight. “Great! Yes! Okay, but are you truly ready for this? What am I saying, of course you are! You’re a great spirit from, from—”

“Meow,” I said.

“Yes, that. Oh, this is going to work out just fine! Stellar! (Does anyone say that anymore?) Right!” Finally she sat herself down in her office chair. Slapping her knees and bending forward—as if convincing her whole body to stay still and stay serious now, for realsies—she intoned, “So! Here’s the gist of the thing: we have two easy ingredients and one hard one.”

“Meow,” I accepted.

“The first one is poledust. Do you know what that is?”

I shook my head.

“It comes from the Kaugs—those are the mountains down south. You have to grind it off the rock. I don’t mean anything dirty, I mean like”—she stuck one palm up vertically while the other hand scratched it—“eek, eek, eek. Grate the Kaugs and it comes off. It’s a whole process and if I explain it I’m gonna get tired. And it’s eleven at night! Too late for that.”

I, uh, didn’t understand all the social nuances of that (namely the dirtiness or non-dirtiness of grinding) but, sure! I nodded energetically both to show I got it and to show enthusiasm.

“That’s the hard part. We’ll save it for later.”

I quirked my head. We?

“Can’t get poledust by slapping the grate on willy-nilly. You need me to come with, and I need to mentally prepare myself if I’m gonna be climbing some absurdly vertical mountains. In the meantime,” she said, jabbing her list of ingredients with her finger, “we can do the two others. There’s got to be thousands of black-winged birds around here, for starters.”

I thought back to Murder, that condor with that ranger looking for the lost cantrip. Did he live around here? Either way, that one could practically be crossed off right now. The thing to focus on now was…

“Fish!” Bayce said. “Why don’t you tackle that one tomorrow?”

I brightened, and my tail wagged like a dog’s. Already I was eyeing the door.

“Not so fast, my little friend. For one thing, I said tomorrow. You need some rest. For another, I won’t let you catch just a few fish. You’ll have to catch…a whole dinner’s worth! Earn your keep, pet!”

Yipe! The way she said that made my hair stand on end—long before I realized that the recipe said I only needed enough fish for four grams of scales.

“…I’m just kidding,” Bayce said, leaning back in her chair. “You’re not a pet, you’re a—a valued visitor!”

Huh. You know, I’d assumed Bayce would be more graceful in conversation than Chora, but maybe they were both way too blunt.

“But I’m not kidding about the ‘dinner’ part. We’re running out of rabbits over here! Plus, it’s not like I can buy more food. My first semester hasn’t even started, but my student debts are through the roof.”

As long as it would make the place happy—and keep everyone fed, me included—I’d do it. Besides, there was a big glittering pot of Experience at the end of the rainbow. It was no trouble, really. I gave Bayce a big, headbanging nod.

“Man, I still feel guilty,” Bayce admitted. “How about this? You’ll compete against me. We’ll see who can catch the most fish by two o’clock tomorrow. See? I pull my weight.”

I shot a look at her studies. Which were all over the place—so I just turned to a random pile.

“Bah! That’s for later. Summer vacation is forever!”

Oh, Bayce. You know how much of a lie that is…

***

From the living room window turned toward the east, red morning light blazed in my face.

So lethargic…just a few more minutes, please…

But the light was too much to bear. Even through my eyelids, even after I’d nudged the covers further up my face, it still seared crimson.

Fine, fine. I said it to myself as if I could tell when Sierra was listening.

As my brain started to rev up again, I discovered, with a little inward groan, that my hind legs were oddly cold. Of course they would be. They were sticking out of the covers at odd angles. And those covers weren’t even on top of the sofa serving as my makeshift bed. Nor was I. One leg, running up the back of the sofa, was about to cramp.

Clearly it’d be a while before I got used to the refined human art of sleeping neatly. Which was weird, since cats sleep in neat little meatballs.

Come to think of it, I shouldn’t have had limbs sticking out anywhere. My limbs were too short. And I swore I wasn’t that sloppy.

It happened because I was human.

I gasped at the revelation—gasped with my human gaspy vocal cords, with my fleshy human hand around my lippy mouth. Then, as if the whole world was pointing and laughing, I whirled upright, tossing the covers onto the living room floor.

How had I transformed in the middle of the night?!

The first thought that rushed into my head was, Oh no oh gosh that was so embarrassing I wonder if anyone came down here in the night, did they see? Did they see it?!

The second was, I can’t believe I did something so…blegh! And by accident!

But the third made me scowl. It was simply, Sierra…

Who else would have the power to transform me at will? No, it wasn’t my subconscious suddenly acting up in the middle of the night—I’d never been a sleepwalker or even a vivid dreamer, so that justification didn’t hold water. Sierra, meanwhile, had forced me into nekomata form on the day I first visited the cabin. Mystery solved! And infuriating!

If my Intelligence wasn’t going up an extra point next Level-Up just from that revelation, I was gonna have to file a complaint. (…With Sierra. Darnit! Hate it when things don’t work out.)

Well, I poofed into a cat and that was that, or so I tried to convince myself. The attempt to soothe my psyche didn’t entirely work, but I soon got distracted by how pretty and pristine the room around me looked. The familiar painting of Reed’s family looked almost regal in the beams of the rising sun, and on the floor just in front of my sleeping sofa, the circular patterns of a rug practically came alive.

The stillness was an illusion, I knew. Outside, birds were starting to sing, and I heard their trilling crisp and clear.

Not only that, but the house itself was moving.

As weird as that sentence sounded, I wasn’t even entirely convinced it was some magic phenomenon unique to Vencia—maybe it was just a consequence of the house being made of so much wood. It creaked. Places even creaked when nobody was touching them, like the windowsill not far from my head.

Oh yeah, and there was definite activity upstairs. I could hear it, if faintly.

—Oh yeah, and I had a Treasure to check up on! Now might’ve been the best time, too—who knew if I would have any good opportunities to sniff it out while the entire “family,” as Reed called it and Bayce and Chora plainly didn’t agree with, was up and active.

Map!

Aw, that was such a tease.

The Treasure I’d gotten a notification for last night was sitting in space A5. In other words, it was in the absolute southwesternmost corner of the Map.

Why oh why did my System feel the need to update me on a Treasure I had no chance of getting to in the span of one day? Or three, even? Plus, it was right around the location of my…m-my…I didn’t even wanna think of it. My southbound journey that got interrupted by lycanborns killing me.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

That very nearly spoiled the moment I heard someone call down the stairs, “Good morning. Did you sleep well?”

It was Reed, her face poking out above the banister in that tiny triangular sliver where the rail met the ceiling. A tendril of bedhead hair dropped over the rail.

“Meow!” I said, and I jumped fully upright.

“Oh, and don’t worry about making the sofa-bed again. I’ll do it! You’re my guest of honor, after all.”

O-oh, oops. Humans had house rules and stuff they wanted to keep neat. I hadn’t even thought about that part—I was just about to leave it like a bird’s nest.

And now that she’d pointed out, I felt guilty! Just like Bayce would!

Hm…on that note, Bayce and I were going out today, weren’t we? It seemed like a shame to go with just the two of us.

As Reed stepped onto the living room floor in her pastel pajamas and wooly pink slippers, I bounded up to her, stopped abruptly at her toes, and pointed my head toward the window.

“What’s outside today?” she said.

I pointed to her, then myself, then…I didn’t bother trying to point at Bayce when she wasn’t here, since that would just be Ambiguity Central, but I gave her the main gist of it. I wished I could convey to her “adventure”! Or “fun”! Or even just “fish”! But if all went well, she’d find that part out soon enough, eh?

A smile warmed her face. “Of course I’ll come outside with you! But can it wait until after breakfast?”

As soon as she said that, my empty stomach vibrated against my spine.